Paralysis in the love song by J. Alfred Prufrock Prufrock's paralysis derives naturally from this subjectification of everything. If all consciousness is an opaque sphere, then Prufrock has no hope of being understood by others. “No experience,” says Bradley in a phrase quoted by Eliot, “can be open to inspection from without” (KE, 203). Prufrock's vision is incommunicable, and whatever he says to the lady will be answered: "That's not what I meant at all./It's not that at all" (CP, 6). The lady is also imprisoned in her own sphere, and the two spheres can never, like soap bubbles, become one. Each is impenetrable to the other. If other consciousnesses exist only as opaque objects to Prufrock, he has an equally unhappy relationship with time and space. One of the riddles of the poem is the question of whether Prufrock ever leaves his room. It seems not, so weak is his will, so ready «for a hundred indecisions,/And for a hundred visions and revisions,/Before taking a toast and a tea» (CP, 4). In another sense, Prufrock couldn't get anywhere, no matter how hard he tried. If all space were assimilated in his mind, then spatial movement would really be movement in the same place, like a man running in a dream. There is no way to distinguish between real movement and imaginary movement. However far Prufrock reaches, he remains imprisoned in his subjective space and all his experience is imaginary. It seems to be a perception of this that keeps him in his room, content to imagine himself going through the streets, climbing the lady's ladder and telling her "everything", like Lazarus returning from the dead. There is no resurrection from the death that destroyed him, and this is one of the meanings of Dante's epigraph. In the same way, time disappears. The space must be external to the self for movement through it to be more than just the continuation of a boring discussion in the mind. Likewise, only objective time can be other than itself, so that the passage of time can mean change for that self. But time, like space, has only a subjective existence for Prufrock. As a result, past, present, and future are equally immediate, and Prufrock is paralyzed. As one of Bradley's finite centers, he is "not in time" and "contains [his] past and future" (KE, 205).